The present invention relates to communications in packet-based networks, and more specifically, to encapsulating packets transmitted on virtual networks.
Traditionally, transmitting data between virtual client devices on virtual networks requires copying the data from the sending virtual client to a host device. The host device performs the encapsulation of the data before transmitting the data out on the physical network using a physical input/output (I/O) adapter, such as a network adapter. The transmitted packets are received at various other physical I/O adapters, which route the packet data to the destination virtual client.